


just sail on, sail on

by superfecta



Category: Original Work
Genre: American Gothic - Freeform, Coming of Age, Family Dynamics, Gay crisis, Gen, Gore, High School, Horror, M/M, Murder Mystery, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Rural gothic, Secret Relationship, like???, rating may go up as story continues, theres a lot goin on here lads
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 04:36:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14663424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfecta/pseuds/superfecta
Summary: “I was seventeen when the murders started.”In the quiet, rural, removed town of Lathansville, people don’t leave. They don’t move away, they won’t move away- they can’t move away, because nobody ever moves away from Lathansville.The people of Lathansville are perfectly happy with things being forever the same.And then, something begins to hunt them.***Daniel Yetto has resigned himself to a life of almosts: almost smart enough, almost enough money, almost okay. Between his boyfriend dreaming of going to college and his best friend trying to pyschoanalyze him, he’s nearly ready to resign himself to a lonely, empty, Lathansville life.And then, something begins to hunt them.





	just sail on, sail on

**Author's Note:**

> this is a first for me! don’t usually post original content on here, but this one struck hard. enjoy and thanks for reading.

I was seventeen when the murders started.

It had been a violent year in town. The kind that makes kids come straight home after school instead of messing about, and the adults mutter to themselves about the improbable threat of moving away from Lathansville. 

They wouldn’t move away from Lathansville. Nobody ever moves away from Lathansville.

But it had been a long and hellish summer, and the fall had been dry and dark, and when the violence reached its peak it somehow felt like no one was tremendously surprised to find the first body.

It was in the park, in the shady corner by the hardware store. Mr. O’Leary found it in the afternoon when he went to the dumpster behind O’Leary’s Hardware. The cops took half an hour to get there, and by the time they did, a crowd had gathered. In his infinite wisdom, Mr. O’Leary had pronounced the victim dead, and therefore not dangerous, and so he allowed the teenagers just getting out of school to gawk at the body, covered in a tarp, so long as they didn’t touch before the police arrived.

“Looks like he was got from the behind,” Mr. O’Leary pronounced when the authorities arrived. “Had that surprised look about him.” He made a raspy noise in the back of his throat and spat a wad of phlegm onto the ground. O’Leary had seen action in the Vietnam War. Out of all the boys to get drafted from Lathansville, he was the only one from his graduating class to come back.  
No one doubted that he knew death well enough.  
“It’ll be easy enough to figure out who got him where back in the lab,” Officer Sowahcowski said. Sowahcowski was the head of the DARE program in the high school, and between his cartoonish mustache and his habit of turning purple in the face when provoked, nobody could quite take him seriously. So when he shooed off the teenagers and told everyone that the town park was closed until further notice, we didn’t all clear out immediately. 

The town park, for starters, was one square lot that had never gotten developed in the original rush of town building. Ten years before I was born, some gun club wanting to make an “impact” bought the lot off foreclosure and declared it to be a “Public Recreation Area,” or, as the rest of the world would call it, a park. But that’s where their impact ended, it seemed, and the park grew in weeds and ruin ever since then. One brave grove of sycamore trees had grown up crooked and dark in one corner by the hardware store, and twenty-seven years after it was turned into a Park, the park was nothing more than shrubs and tall grasses.

So naturally, my friends and I climbed the sycamores to watch the crime scene.

It was Marie Hayes, Seb, and me up in the largest tree. Marie was perched on one branch as Seb crowded me against the trunk on the other. I pretended not to notice when his hand slipped around my waist and held tight. In the other trees, I could see half the lacrosse team clinging to one and three kids from the orchestra in the other. A good representation of our tiny high school, I thought, small enough that we wouldn’t get caught, big enough that the stories would be credible. 

There was a strange hush in the park that day, as we sat in the sycamores; usually the noise of traffic and pedestrians of Lathansville, talking and driving and eating, surrounded the park. Today, though, it was like the town was waiting for something. Watching, even, as the sheriff’s department closed off the park and prepared to move the body.

The breeze blew, sickly warm and slow, and Marie Hayes, on the other side of the tree trunk, shivered.

“That’s the devil’s breath,” she whispered. I glanced over at her. She was squinting into the overhang of the tree in front of her, a strange look on her face. She frowned and looked at me suddenly. “Don’t you feel it, Danny?”

“Not the day for that,” I said back. I didn’t know quite what was happening with the sheriff down there- was it really even a body?- but it felt wrong to joke about that when there was potentially a human under the green plastic tarp. 

When there was potentially what used to be a human under it.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” she said anyways, and settled herself against the sycamore trunk, out of my line of sight. Seb leaned in close and rested his chin on my shoulder.

“Too afraid of the Devil to joke?” he said softly, and I smiled in spite of myself.

“Terrified.” Seb laughed and held me a little closer. 

I let him. 

We never really talked about what we were, but I thought he liked me. More than liked me, really, the “like-like” that little kids coo about on the playground. The kind of like that would make a regular guy take his girlfriend out to the movies and then screw her in his car in the parking lot afterwards. But Seb wasn’t a regular guy, and neither was I, so we got along without talking about it, in smiles and jokes and holding hands in the movies when it was dark and no one could see. He had a car, a really nice car, that used to be his brother’s, but the furthest I ever got in that thing was a kiss on the cheek when he’d drop me off at home afterwards. That’s all he dared do.

That’s all he could do, at least in Lathansville, and nobody ever left Lathansville, and so that’s all he would do. Would ever do.

So I leaned back further against him, and together we watched in silence as Officer Sowahcowski and three other guys from the sheriff’s office two towns over draped the area in crime scene tape and took pictures of everything.

“We in those photos?” Marie Hayes’ voice floated over from the other side of the tree, and Seb laughed under his breath.

“In today’s episode of CSI…” he trailed off. There was a giggle from the other side of the tree, and then Marie began to hum the opening theme.

“Shhh!” One of the lacrosse kids in the tree behind us hissed. “They’re talking!” Marie stopped humming instantly and sure enough, voices floated up to us.

“-Under,” Sowahcowski was saying to the guy with the camera. “We haven’t had any missing persons reported recently, so either this is some kind of vagrant, or it’ll be someone from right here in town who-”

“Alright, alright.” The sheriff waved him off dismissively. “We’re observing, not playing Sherlock. Tom’s talking to the guy who found him now, getting his statement. Once he’s done, we’ll bring the body to the coroner’s and- you do have coroner’s office, don’t you?”

“Do we have- ” Sowahcowski bristled under the question. “Of course we do. It’s in the basement of the urgent care building.”

“Right. Of course.” Something in his tone struck Sowahcowski the wrong way, and we in the trees bit back laughter as he started purpling the way he did in DARE when somebody asked a particularly stupid question. “Officer Dagget, I know you folks in Shaker Falls may not think very much of us, but the police force of Lathansville take our jobs very seriously, and I do not appreciate your tone, sir.”

“The police force of Lathansville?” Dagget sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “All three of you?”

“Look, buddy-”

“Dagget?” One of the other officers called him away, and we were robbed of a prime opportunity to watch Sowahcowski have one of his legendary meltdowns. Dagget sauntered over to the new officer, Mr. O’Leary trailing behind him, and looked down at the report. 

“You’re Callum O’Leary?”

“Ayuh.”

“Owner of O’Leary Hardware?”

“Ayuh.”

“You found him?”

“Ayuh.”

Dagget squinted up from the report, trying to decide if he was being insolent, and decided against it. There was a moment as he finished reading the report, where Sowahcowski paced back and forth importantly and the other faceless officers scuttled about the scene like so many bugs. Finally Dagget sighed and flipped the paper report cover closed. He looked down at the tarp, shockingly blue against the dead grass of the park.

“Let’s take a look at him,” he said at last. There was the faintest rustle from the trees around us as the collective students of Lathansville High School leaned forward to get a better look. The park seemed to be completely removed from the rest of town; not a single sound from the outside seemed to enter. The nameless officers from Shaker Falls gathered in a ragged semicircle, and Mr. O’Leary and Sowahcowski stood to the right. In the middle, from where I sat, Officer Dagget seemed to be a photograph- frozen, picturesque, completely removed from the situation. Then, all at once, he leaned forward and pulled the tarp off in one quick motion and let the body underneath be seen.

“Holy shit,” I heard Marie Hayes breath on the other side of the tree, and that seemed to sum up the situation completely. The person on the ground was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. His arms were thrown horribly to the side, like a ragdoll, and the look on he face was one of complete and utter fear. 

O’Leary was right. He had been got from behind. Nobody looked like that if you saw it coming. 

“Shit,” Seb breathed in my ear. “Is that Chris Marrek ?” I squinted down at the body. I tried not to look at the face- it was too blank for me to try and remember someone with it. So I focused on the rest of the body. The chest was nondescript in a grey t-shirt, the jeans were commonplace. Then-

“His shoes,” I blurted out suddenly. “Seb, Chris’ shoes-”

There, on the corpse’s feet, were Chris Marrek’s unmistakable yellow sneakers, pristine in life, and now soaked through with the deep cherry brown of drying blood.

“Aw, shit,” Sowahcowski said faintly. “Christopher. I- I knew him.”

“Check his back,” O’Leary said suddenly, loudly, and everyone jumped, even us in the trees. Dagget and Sowahchowski turned as one to stare at O’Leary. He was staring at the body with a blank expression, and for one horrible moment he looked as lifeless as the boy on the ground. “He was got from the back.” There was a pause as one of the faceless officers snapped photographs, and then Sowahcowski and Dagget both grabbed a shoulder and flipped Chris onto his stomach.

His entire back was clawed to— shreds. Literal, actual shreds: strips hung off, flopping about sickly as the blood grew tacky in the air. The white of his spine glistened through mounds and mounds of red, seen from the back through the wreckage of flesh.

The result was instantaneous: I could hear someone in tree behind us cry out suddenly, the officers all withdrew like they were on fire. Marie Hayes took a huge gulping breath. I clutched at Seb’s arm around me, and stared and stared and stared, unable to look away from the mess that used to be Chris Marrek.

Chris Marrek, class president, soccer star, the perfect Lathansville boy.

Chris Marrek.

Chris Marrek.

 

Dead.

**Author's Note:**

> more to come. speak your minds in the comments- i always love to hear them!


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